McDonald's and Chick-fil-A are tracking your location to make sure your fries are perfectly crispy when you come collect your mobile order

• McDonald's and Chick-fil-A are tracking the locations of customers who place mobile orders.
• Their restaurants use this data to make sure orders are ready and still hot when customers arrive.

McDonald's and Chick-fil-A are both introducing app features that track mobile-order customers' locations so staff can start making their meals when they're close to the restaurant.

Chick-fil-A said earlier this month that under the new feature, if a customer places a curbside or carryout order on its app and enables their location services, then the restaurant in question will be alerted when the customer is close so that staff can start preparing their order.

By carefully timing when mobile orders are made, restaurants are able to cut down on how long their customers wait to collect their order, while ensuring their burgers and fries are still crispy and piping hot. The technology is known as geofencing — using GPS to create a virtual fence around a location.

McDonald's introduced a geofencing feature to its app in March.

"Using existing location data, it allows our crew to start assembling a customer's order prior to their arrival at the restaurant, ultimately delivering hot, fresh food when customers arrive to pick up their order," CFO Ian Borden said at the fast-food giant's earnings call last month.

Restaurant Business reported that McDonald's geofencing technology alerts a restaurant when a mobile order customer is three minutes away.

"While it's still early days deploying this new digital enhancement, initial results are already pointing to improved service times and elevated customer satisfaction scores," Borden told investors.

Though it's unclear exactly what proportion of McDonald's orders are made on its app, Borden said that digital sales — orders placed made through the McDonald's app, at an order kiosk in a restaurant, or via a delivery service — made up around 40% of all sales in the first quarter of 2023.

Chick-fil-A is rolling out its geofencing technology at restaurants in the early summer. It said it had already tested the feature at 100 US restaurants and found that customers' wait times were, on average, reduced by between one and two minutes.

The chicken-sandwich chain said that it was also adding a feature that gives customers an estimate of when their mobile order would be ready, based on factors including order complexity and size

"Even though it's an estimate, it's pretty accurate," Chick-fil-A said in a press release.

The fast-food industry was already seeing substantial growth in off-premise consumption before the pandemic really accelerated this trend. More people are getting food delivered, placing orders in advance online, or ordering to-go, like at a drive-thru, and restaurants are changing their operations to adapt to this.

McDonald's, for example, opened a small-format test restaurant aimed at take-out and delivery customers in late 2022. It includes an order-ahead lane where customers can drive up and retrieve mobile orders from a conveyer belt, dedicated parking spots for delivery drivers, and pick-up shelves where customers can collect orders.

Chick-fil-A has also tested an express drive-thru lane exclusively for mobile orders, allowing them to skip the traditional drive-thru line.